Abstract
Coleridge’s reputation rests on comparatively few poems and it would be hard to find a poet who has left more pieces unfinished. It is impossible to say whether he would now be remembered as a poet at all had he not met Wordsworth. He had other literary friends, among them Charles Lamb and Robert Southey, who became his brother-in-law, but it was after his meeting with Wordsworth in 1795 and his close association with the poet and his sister, which began in 1797, that his poetic talent had its brief flowering. The poems for which he is remembered fall into three groups: the purely magical, represented by Kubla Khan; the short blank verse poems, known as the ‘conversation’ poems and mostly written about 1798; and the ballad or medieval-type poems, such as Christabel and The Ancyent Marinere.
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Notes
One of the most recent appraisals of Jakobson’s work in this area is ‘The Poetic Function and the Nature of Language’ by Linda R. Waugh in Roman Jakobson: Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, eds Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 155–7.
For a synopsis of Hartley’s ideas see R. C. & Kathleen Oldfield, ‘Hartley’s Observations on Man’, Annals of Science, 7 (1951), 371–81.
George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1944), p. 581.
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© 1989 Frances Austin
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Austin, F. (1989). Coleridge. In: The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Language of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20001-6_6
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